Quote of the day

I found this indictment by Eliot Weinberger of the terrible predicament of contemporary criticism in Squandermania and other foibles. If you substitute Canada for the United States, it's what I've been trying to say for years.

The United States doesn’t have the class of literary supplements that you find in Spain and many other countries. It only has one important periodical literary criticism publication: The New York Review of Books. There aren’t any powerful American critics any more, as there were up until the 1960s, writing in a prose that was understandable by anyone and introducing literature into the political, social and moral problems of the day. So-called ‘serious’ criticism has passed, for the main part, into the dominion of academics, who write in a specialist jargon, in the strange belief that the complex can only be presented by means of impenetrable phrases… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to ‘recommendations’, which arrive through reviews, blogs and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one can turn in search of ideas …

"Mina"

Mina Loy

At stake is space, essential
  umber-coloured
What is it? A dusky lair of deep
  deep sleep And
                who is it?

  Mina,
her lips curved to storefronts
  of NY,
closing softer over Parnasse,
  cooing, too
for soft white arms

                              Mina,
  owl-huntress
or the more sensuously lipped
  Luna herself,
poet lover of panting Djuna
  and Gertie
who enter her as light

                              At centre
  is Mina quirky,
each eye a closed dark wisdom
  & a bit lubricious—
lover of soft-petalled Djuna
  & pretty arms

"Anita today, or the drive home from work"

Cloud banks won't give an inch, weary with the jokes,
and there for a first day (a first time) comes up a life—
 ha!

Looking for sunbreak's too much of a lady who's high.
Solitary weeks arrayed in a row look like streaks on the old old
  old—

(funny me in that mood which wishes clouds into O'Day,
and a lippy grin) A face, hers, Anita's along the road coming to
  a blue lake

is what this is. Birds,e.g. still as in a series of cool asphodels,
in their own feathery and white but ornamental gloves
 aren't

Sure she'd felt what it was like to wear the predawn and a hat
just like one. Driving up the road in that ridiculously long
 and rising way,

today's all it took for me to see. Image followed by a trilogy
of things things things—bird, hat & lake—is all the mood, given
 by road

there is, for me.

Poetry and race: is it really an issue?

At Poetry Foundation appears an interesting piece titled "Writing Like a White Guy: On language, race and poetry" by poet Jaswinder Bolina in which poet purposely blurs racial divides like those between language & ethnicity or cultural identity and race in order to expose possible obstacles to his own literary apprenticeship. And, if I'm not mistaken, he appears to be doing it for some sort of rhetorical effect. He can't possibly think any borderblur is a benefit to what poets do, can he? I can't quite see my way to granting any need for a language and race divide in the discussion of genuine poetic expression. I wonder if the whole matter of race & literariness isn't, after all, just critical posturing, accorded only a sort of writing class earnestness. The usual university seminar table talk.

To begin with, Bolina's claim that literary survival means assimilation can't be too easily linked to a poet's desire to preserve the integrity of his craft. To factor name, skin color and country of origin into literary biography is a regrettable fact of life, he says, since constructing a poetics as a visible minority always raises fears of the Other. And the Other to which he's referring, for presumably rhetorical effect, is the poet himself. It seems talk of the Other, taken from postcolonial critique, is still part of poetry discussion today, and surely by now it's grown stale with use. Racial tension of this sort is very palpable and very unsettling but only to this particular poet. Bolina can speak only for himself

If the racial Other aspires to equal footing on the socioeconomic playing field, he is tasked with forcing his way out of the categorical cul-de-sac that his name and appearance otherwise squeeze him into. We call the process by which he does this “assimilation.” Though the Latin root here—shared with the other word “similar”—implies that the process is one of becoming absorbed or incorporated, it is a process that relies first on the negation of one identity in order to adopt another. In this sense, assimilation is a destructive rather than constructive process. It isn’t a come-as-you-are proposition, a simple matter of being integrated into the American milieu because there exists a standing invitation to do so. Rather, assimilation first requires refuting assumptions the culture makes about the immigrant based on race, and in this sense assimilation requires the erasure of one’s preexisting cultural identity even though that identity wasn’t contingent upon race in the first place.

In a country like the US where "class and race structurally overlap", imposing very real strictures on creativity is par for the course. The Sikh Punjabi poet, like any nonwhite artist, feels necessarily condemned to working within a language & artistic milieu that must be necessarily racialized, sexualized, deracialized, etc. etc. and in the end this means being compelled to make what he calls the "pragmatic gambit" of assimilation. To write is necessarily to be restricted to any one of available (& competing?) language groups: there's in America no allegiance, as in the UK, to a benchmark King's English to which every regional dialect pays its dues still. Assimilation is not, however, a premise, even a minor one, I'm prepared to grant.

I can't in any way see the Canadian in me, for example, as having to undergo any assimilative moves in order to talk to American poets (which I regularly do online). Does the race and language divide necessarily include only visible marks of difference such as accent, skin colour, religious belief: does being white catholic Canadian, as in my case, mean the same as being Sikh Punjabi? I suspect if it did, Bolina wouldn't really have anything to say and yet there is a prima facie need to address the issue of race. Literary discourse without race just wouldn't be taken seriously these days, even though there's really no need to mention it. Bolina's own disavowal of the importance of race does strike me, to be sure, as artful or markedly disingenuous. I can't tell which.

Race is a subject I don’t offer any attention to. To do so would seem only to underscore my Otherness, which would only result in the same sorts of requisite exclusions I experienced growing up in mostly white schools and neighborhoods. Assimilation in those circumstances isn’t a choice so much political as it is necessary. Some remnant of a survival instinct kicks in, and one’s best efforts are directed at joining rather than resisting the herd. To be racialized is to be marginalized. When another Asian kid joins the playground, we unwittingly vie to out-white each other. This tactic I learned from practice but also from my immigrant family. When your numbers are few, assimilation is the pragmatic gambit

The result (and the flaw in Bolinda's argument & others that purposely conflate race and poetry) is that two 'languages' are spoken of here, and the two don't easily cohabit the same literary space: the one easily assimilable to a poetico-political discourse where language entails race and, of course, that other more problematic language of poets only an Eliot or a Mallarmé can aptly address. What results is an irreconcilable split in both language and the literary psyche, and this is in no small way attributable to the annoying writing class (MFA) chatter in the young poet's head from which, even well into a literary career, it's all but impossible to extricate himself. Writing by the book is a hard practice to shake.

To the poet, though, the first question isn’t one of class or color. The first question is a question of language. Poetry—as Stéphane Mallarmé famously tells the painter and hapless would-be poet Edgar Degas—is made of words, not ideas. However, to the poet of color or the female poet, to the gay or transgendered writer in America, and even to the white male writer born outside of socioeconomic privilege, a difficult question arises: “Whose language is it?” Where the history of academic and cultural institutions is so dominated by white men of means, “high” language necessarily comes to mean the language of whiteness and a largely wealthy, heteronormative maleness at that. The minority poet seeking entry into the academy and its canon finds that her language is deracialized/sexualized/gendered/classed at the outset.

"Poet of color" is as specious a category of the underprivileged artist as gay, transgendered, etc. There's no declassifying according to race, gender, & sexuality at the beginning of the writing project except, of course, in MFA courses. The only real Other to appear in Bolina's is 'transnormativity', the new villain in contemporary criticism personified in his article by the "kind, white-haired, white-skinned locals" of a recent poetry reading; and the only isolate self to suffer cultural alienation is of the poet's own making. Instead of paying attention to the always more interesting interplay of process and order in 'minority writing' (such as that in Aimé Césaire or Joseph Brodsky, for example) , Bolina resorts to schmaltzy Wertherian laments. And at times it does seem interminable.

In trafficking in “high” English, writers other than educated, straight, white, male ones of privilege choose to become versed in a language that doesn’t intrinsically or historically coincide with perceptions of their identities. It’s true that minority poets are permitted to bring alternative vernaculars into our work. Poets from William Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to Frank O’Hara in his “Personism: a manifesto” demand as much by insisting that poetry incorporate language nearer to conversational speech than anything overly elevated. Such calls for expansions of literary language in conjunction with continuing experiments by recent generations of American poets are transforming the canon for sure, but this leaves me and perhaps others like me in a slightly awkward position. I don’t possess a vernacular English that’s significantly different from that of plain old Midwestern English. As such, it seems I’m able to write from a perspective that doesn’t address certain realities about myself, and this makes me queasy as anything. The voice in my head is annoyed with the voice in my writing. The voice in my head says I’m disregarding difference, and this feels like a denial of self, of reality, of a basic truth.

It isn’t exactly intentional. It’s a product of being privileged. In the 46 years since my father left Punjab, the 40 or so years since my mother left also, my parents clambered the socioeconomic ladder with a fair amount of middle-class success. We’re not exactly wealthy, but I do wind up in prep school instead of the public high school, which only isolates me further from those with a shared racial identity. Later I attend university, where I’m permitted by my parents’ successes to study the subjects I want to study rather than those that might guarantee future wealth. I don’t need to become a doctor or a lawyer to support the clan. I get to major in philosophy and later attend graduate school in creative writing. Through all of this, though I experience occasional instances of bigotry while walking down streets or in bars, and though I study in programs where I’m often one of only two or three students of color, my racial identity is generally overlooked or disregarded by those around me. I’ve become so adept in the language and culture of the academy that on more than one occasion when I bring up the fact of my race, colleagues reply with some variation of “I don’t think of you as a minority.”etc. etc

The only other writer in whom I've seen this same fashionable self-lament, every bit as disingenuous & textbookish, is Carmine Starnino. His article "Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook" is an anecdotal version of essentially the same type of literary autobiography, told in the flippant ironist style of those used to writing by government subsidies alone (but that's another matter). As I've said Bolina's case has some prima facie significance given the realities of race and the American immigrant experience. Both essays are of a piece, notwithstanding: the same sort of Poetry Foundation magazine controversy published for and by writing class poets.

"Writing Like a White Guy" is the usual identity-angst credo of contemporary poetics—usually for lack of anything better to say— and the result is bound to be a very predictable poetry. The opening few strophes of a Bolina poem entitled "Portrait of the Self", for example, come as no suprise to me. Here's writing over attentive to itself and really at a loss for significant phrasing: perhaps a case of form following the 'formlessness' of authorial voice. Lyricism always is the poorer for it.

The self wakes up extruded of whims


No tango in its Rorschach,
no mermen in its sea.

Just the self with its dull appendages,

all radial arm and ulna, no wing.

Dark face of the self in the reflective dark
of the microwave door,

the self so somber no-one would hold its hand
at a roller rink any longer than two revolutions, etc.

It wouldn't have made any difference (would it?) if a white or Sikh Punjabi or gay or transgendered person had written it. Or rather seminar theory may perhaps have served as welcome distraction from work as good, bad or indifferent as this. Who's to say? O! young sophisticate of the word the poetry you write is the person you've already become & to make them collide (as you like to do for effect) is plain disastrous. When you separate race and language, & problematize their relations, you're never going to do any better than a self's "Dark face" reflected in the "dark/of the microwave door".

"Ex gratia" by Andreas Gripp

Cover photo for Ex gratia

Poet Andreas Gripp has recently sent me his latest chapbook, ex gratia a book Gripp enjoins us to read as a sequence of poems. It's no surprise to me—acquainted as I've become, over the past several years, with his style, temperament & sensibilities—that any selection can give the poetic effect of a whole work just as easily as if it were read on its own. I think the wonderful interplay of lyricism and language evident in Gripp's poetry in general can't but tie the particular piece to a single pervading tone. And the tone is a distinctively mournful one from beginning to end.

ex gratia is a book of love, loss and mourning but particularly, as its title suggests, a love given without qualification, perhaps the most tragic of all. Love is lost at the very start, shadowed by a dead rival and inconsolable grief. Since he's continually faced with both the poet-narrator, in troubadour fashion, resorts to evoking poetic figures, images of a calming nature and dirge-like refrains of "letting go" ("Ex gratia") as a means of keeping a relationship alive. To encounter them in Gripp's chapbook comprises the chief reading pleasure.

On your couch,
hearing the din
of the summer storm,
my hand makes a move to yours
during the scores of overlapping
rumbles,

and it flinches, yours does,

not from the sound
of the thunder,
but by the sight of four
of my fingers
subtly stretching, contending
for your contact,

and your reflex is speedier
than the lightning strikes
outside,

your words just as burning,

I can't, I'm sorry,
I won't,

his hands only... (from "The Comforting, or the attempt at such")

Water, the garden soil, flowers, time of year are each a sort of symbolic cross erected by poet at each stage of their brief three-year journey. The Charing Cross analogy is not fanciful: there's something particularly solemn and graceful here, something befitting a nobility of artistic temperament that leaves lyrical traces to the grieving heart. If Edward's grief was for a real Eleanor of Castile, the poet's is rather for a love that, even when taken away from him, gives him only more whispering denials.

And of her, the one I met
in the Spring,
the one who accompanies
my comings and goings
from this godless, pitiful place,

I think she whispers something,
about feeling, how she feels,
and I'm unable to hear it,
to bear it, any of it,
my half-there reply,

not now, I'm sorry,
not yet. (from "The World Revolved and We Felt It Not")

A kind thank you to my friend Andreas Gripp for a lyricism of love's unfeeling wheel never retold so elegantly and so endearingly.

"How the bonobos came to christ"

A more loving, kinder species to eat of the fruit, tangy as the brine A lubricious brow's
  worth the risk

To be safe inside, shirtless, under the broad-  brimmed leaf, in the heat, is worthy
   the preening—& abjection oh!—

freed from the water-stain &  voluntary wound in the thigh that never closes, never

'Collective is the corrective!' she says, as the jaws thrust into  the wind attest

An ugly organ of death is the mouth of a he-spartan cycling and meaning ever to be one
  to loners!

To be holy by the sign of a hand-clap  makes her Lady  — who is  rather crotch-
  respectful to them's as inside—

but teeth grind on and spin greedily, with the toes or rocks & verdures looking
  the same, same as everything!

A slew of rind, under bushel & toes, speak well to the eternal junket of seed, munch
  and tree,
                 two becoming three

"In St. James park"

No I can never go; it is dark beyond my gate;
And my mind could not live out there
                                           (Frank Samperi)

_______

Here are insupportables of life, and suns in a
  standoff with dust

unleash the crows on them—just two crows!—
  The dark wing, as it's mean

 and roguish, (snapt
& torn, too, in the same wind and sun)
 is upon them    
                      Mohawks compete with locals
  for some fear, too

Do they mean to join us, in the parks?

    Wind and the suns
mean no harm, not with all the tents & needles
    in a row:

not when sex confects a church, & compels a lot
      of Love,
          Exudation
          Electricity

They mock the Abbé who offers donuts, the greying
  politico with fairish jaw

                         Girls happy to lie sprawled in yurts,
                                 food out of a can,
                                 cold        

What's it a question of anyways, money, sex, or bodies
  without organs?

Nothing's heavy-handed here! they repeat daily—          
  Look!     just
               isolated
               yurts,
               locals,
               girls, cold-bitten